Evaluating group identity and professional identity of institutional employees in promoting the function of social capital in the auditing profession

Legitimizing the auditing profession in terms of social standing is an issue that has often been challenging to achieve a framework for understanding due to the prevalence of professional conflicts and expectations gaps. This study essentially seeks to answer the question of whether the development of emerging aspects of social capital will result in differences between the professional identity functions of employees in individual and group identities in auditing firms. The present study, while proposing hypotheses through text mining methods, qualitative two-phase analyses, and then using the Delphi method based on two criteria of mean and agreement coefficient, seeks to measure the reliability of the criteria derived from the RapidMiner stage so that they can be explained in the context of the study in the quantitative phase. In the quantitative phase of the study, analysis of variance is also used to determine the differences in the social capital functions of auditing firms under professional identity and group identity in the target society. Based on the results, the structure of audit firms requires group identity formation in order to benefit from the capacities of specialized strategy in a competitive market. Therefore, group identity in audit firms should be considered as one of the internal capabilities, a basis for stimulating social capital functions, and professional identity, which is the basis of social identity in auditing and considers the functions of individual performance of auditors in the firm, has a higher capacity for the occurrence of the success function than the spirituality function in influencing the functions of social capital.